All of the accused were charged with committing the gravest war crimes and with planning and carrying out a plot against peace and humanity—the murder and brutal treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, the plundering of private and public property, and the establishment of a system of slave labor. In addition, the tribunal raised the question of branding as criminal various organizations of fascist Germany, such as the leadership of the National Socialist Party, the Storm Troopers (SA), security detachments of the National Socialist Party (the SS), the security services (SD), the secret police (Gestapo), the Nazi government (the cabinet), and the General Staff.

During the trials, 403 open judicial sessions were held, 116 witnesses were questioned, and numerous written depositions and documentary materials were examined, chiefly the official documents of the German ministries and departments, the General Staff, military industrial enterprises, and banks.

To coordinate the investigation and substantiate the charges, a committee of the chief prosecutors was formed: R. A. Rudenko (the USSR), Robert Jackson (the USA), H. Shawcross (Great Britain), and F. de Menthon and later, C. de Ribes (France).

Sentences were pronounced from Sept. 30 to Oct. 1, 1946. With the exception of Schacht, Fritzsche, and Papen, all of the accused were found guilty. Goring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann (in absentia) were sentenced to death by hanging; Hess, Funk, and Raeder, to life imprisonment; Schirach and Speer, to 20 years in prison; Neurath, to 15; and Doenitz, to ten. The tribunal declared the SS, the Gestapo, the SD, and the leadership of the Nazi Party to be criminal organizations. The member of the tribunal from the USSR presented a separate opinion expressing his disagreement with the acquittal of Schacht, Fritzsche, and Papen and with the refusal to declare the Nazi cabinet and General Staff to be criminal organizations. The appeals of the condemned for pardons were rejected by the Control Council, and the death sentences were carried out in the early hours of Oct. 16, 1946. Goring committed suicide shortly before his scheduled execution.

The Nuremberg Trials, the first international trials in history, recognized aggression as a grave crime; punished as criminals those government figures guilty of planning, unleashing, and waging aggressive wars; and justly and deservedly punished the organizers and executors of the criminal plans for the extermination of millions of innocent people and for the subjugation of entire nations. The principles of international law contained in the Charter of the Tribunal and expressed in the sentence were affirmed by a resolution passed by the UN General Assembly on Dec. 11, 1946.

Seventy years after the Allies liberated the camps, we still read about the Holocaust and the other Nazi crimes in part because we are afraid of becoming like Hans Demotte: We fear that we will start to think of monstrous actions as just the way of the world.

As a case in point, Schroeder points to the hard-won recognition of Nazi crimes against the Jews, and illustrates that even while it required Allied pressure to establish thirteen Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation across Germany, these organizations proved successful at tackling remnants of Nazi antisemitism.

Thomas Will, the deputy head of the special prosecutors' office that investigates Nazi crimes, said he had made his decision even before seeing the new testimony that Karkoc ordered his unit to attack the Polish village of Chlaniow.

The family rejected an Israeli honoring probably because it shares my opinion about the Israeli cabinet, which is currently carrying out the same kind of Nazi crimes that the Jews had once suffered from.

The first ever exhibition in China devoted to Nazi crimes against humanity has sought to draw more attention to it, with some success: in less than two months, more than 70,000 people visited "Auschwitz: death camp" in Beijing.

The Minister then met with the University s Rector, Bishop Borys Gudziak and faculty members, held a roundtable with non-governmental organizations to discuss the state of democracy in Ukraine, and visited the Lonsky Prison Museum, the site of both Communist and Nazi crimes.

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